The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz
(Little, Brown, £20)
The UK edition of this book will be published by Aurum Press in hardback in April, priced £25.
I used to feel that listening to Frank Sinatra gave me insight into my father's character. He was a man with no interest in music, and never aspired to that peculiar, musty, ring-a-ding style of hipness that characterised Sinatra and his circle, but still, something of the Sinatra aura, some notion of what it meant to be a man during the two decades encompassing the second world war and the 1950s, some of those hard-boiled attitudes towards love, honour and manhood seemed to cling to him and his friends, as to Frank and his.
I don't know if my son gets similar intimations when he listens to the Beatles, but it wouldn't surprise me. In ways that go well beyond their music—although it would be unthinkable without the music—the group embodied the ethos of their era. For those of us who were fortunate to be young at such a time, the Beatles' style, their tastes, their enthusiasms, even their foolishness and excesses, defined the 1960s.
So it's not surprising that Bob Spitz, introducing the notes at the end of his new book, mentions "nearly 500 volumes" already published on the subject. We baby boomers, so famously self-regarding, are not only interested in learning about the Beatles, but also, as we make our long slog across the actuarial tables, in searching for clues about our own lives and our own youth.
The Beatles is a massive affair, with over 850 pages of text, and another 100 pages or so of notes and endpapers. Spitz purports to tell the Beatles' story with an investigative rigour lacking in other accounts, and he has performed his task with diligence. Starting with John Lennon's early childhood, and ending with the group's messy dissolution, he has discovered plenty of new material, and makes a serious effort to distinguish between the frequently repeated public relations myths and what actually happened. (He quotes Paul McCartney as saying that only about 65 per cent of Hunter Davies's biography, once regarded as definitive, is accurate.) This is a fan's book—who but a fan would devote so much time to the endeavour?—but it isn't hagiography.
Nevertheless, there are few headline-making revelations. We learn more about Lennon's troubled childhood and get a fuller portrait of his flighty mother Julia and his withholding Aunt Mimi (a harsher personality than portrayed in previous accounts). McCartney is situated within a loving middle-class family, a bright, upwardly mobile boy whose bourgeois trajectory was permanently deflected by rock and roll. Much more space is devoted to Brian Epstein than in other books, and the portrait of this self-loathing, self-destructive man is more rounded and poignant than any we have been given previously. The accounts of George Harrison and Ringo Starr are somewhat less satisfying; George's personal elusiveness seems, as always, to defy portraiture (although an unattractive instance of antisemitism makes a surprise appearance), whereas Ringo comes across as pretty much the same person we always thought we knew, not elusive at all.
The Beatles did not become the best band in Liverpool by accident, and Spitz is very good on the purposefulness with which Lennon, at first alone, and later in concert with McCartney, nurtured the development of the group. Lennon was always willing to risk his dominance in exchange for securing the best players available to him, and he could be chillingly ruthless about jettisoning friends who weren't measuring up. At every stage—not only the famous occasion when Pete Best was sacked just before the Beatles made their first record for EMI—he opted for excellence over loyalty. When, one violent night in Hamburg, Paul finally drove John's great art college friend Stuart Sutcliffe out of the group for a complicated variety of reasons, personal as well as musical, John didn't intervene. Stuart was a mate, but he wasn't pulling his weight.
Spitz is less interesting on the Beatlemania era. Perhaps that period has been chronicled too frequently. We already know about the early hits, the tours, the screams, the Royal Command Performance, America, Ed Sullivan, A Hard Day's Night, marijuana, LSD, Manila, Help! and so on. It would have been interesting to learn more about the shifting personal alliances and relationships within the group. What was the friendship of Lennon and McCartney really like when it was at its closest? When did Ringo cease feeling like an interloper and start believing himself to be fully integrated with the group? At what point did Harrison start to resent the subsidiary position to which he had been relegated? How did Ringo and George repair their relationship after George slept with Ringo's first wife, Maureen (an incident not detailed in Spitz's book, incidentally)? Some of this material is by now known only to two living people, if to any at all. And either those people aren't talking, or no one, including Bob Spitz, has asked them.
But Spitz is illuminating once again when he reaches the Beatles' final years, giving us far more information about the tensions that ultimately drove the men apart. He provides a clear account of Yoko Ono's mischievous impact on John and his three bandmates. Although he never expresses it overtly, his detestation of Yoko is palpable, and he adduces enough evidence to make a compelling case. But even Yoko's disruptive impact must be regarded as a symptom, not a cause of the break-up; four very young men were belatedly coming to emotional maturity, and it was inevitable their paths would eventually diverge. To have been so close for so long, and under such a unique set of circumstances, more or less guaranteed that the separation, when it came, would be explosive. McCartney went into a deep depression; Lennon, among other things, became a heroin addict.
Spitz is manifestly a conscientious and enterprising researcher. He is not, however, a graceful writer. The book abounds in solecisms, malapropisms and howlers of all sorts. He gets some stray facts wrong too. "Just Walkin' in the Rain" was a hit for Johnnie Ray, not Frankie Laine. In the 1950s, Rod Davis would not have paid "37 pence" for a pair of jeans. Jackie Gleason was not a crooner, but a comedian who occasionally conducted "easy listening" records with soupy orchestrations. Alan Bennett is left out of the cast list of Beyond the Fringe. Yehudi Menuhin was still very much alive in 1966.
The book would have benefited from a more aggressive editor. But its flaws notwithstanding, it is far more than a valuable addition to the voluminous literature on the Beatles. It is almost certain to become the standard biography.
And after reading it, one feels the poignancy of the Beatles' careers more than the excitement. How utterly distorting it must have been to be a Beatle. To become one of the most famous people in the world at age 20, to have so much wealth and so much adulation, an enabling entourage and millions of fans validating one's most irrational caprices and one's most grandiose notions about oneself; there's no way this would leave a person unaffected, no matter how sane or bright. The follies they committed—the abominable Magical Mystery Tour film, for example, which, tellingly, McCartney still sees fit to defend, the catastrophic series of business ventures known collectively as Apple Corps, the flirtation with the Maharishi, the drugs, the portentous pronouncements on all manner of subjects beyond their knowledge and experience—attest to the destructive impact of early and excessive fame. Fortunately, perhaps even miraculously, none of this ever affected their music for very long. The music survives, and will endure.
